An electric meter is used to assist electric utility companies to monitor electrical energy usage at a respective household or place of business. Electricity tampering is a phenomena conducted by unscrupulous people to obtain free electricity use by compromising the electricity meter typically installed at household residences and businesses to alter their recorded energy consumed. Theft of electricity via meter tampering is a large problem ($1B-10B in lost revenue).
Utilities that have installed smart meters would like to leverage their investment by reducing this loss. Today, common methods include visual inspection of usage and ad-hoc auditing, i.e., manual processes to perform ad-hoc analysis of meter usage data. False positives are embarrassing and can damage customer relationships.
There currently does not exist any method of system to help an electric utility detect electricity theft. What few techniques are available are not coordinated with the electric utility company, nor are existing techniques effective in any sense to detect and/or isolate a single household's converting of electrical energy via meter tampering.
That is, many supervised learning techniques exist but these suffer from the need to have labeled theft data which is very hard to obtain. A system and method that addresses the need to perform such an analysis using unsupervised methods with unsupervised data would be highly desirable.